Remembering Mum and Dad: All Soul's Day 1 November 2021

 This a re-post from last year.  The sentiments are unchanged and always will be, but I've updated it to take account of the passage of time and the Pandemic.

Forget Hallowe'en.  

Despite all the trick or treating, crazy costumes and horror movies on the telly, here in Poland it's no more than a sideshow.  Thankfully the American obsession with it hasn't reached us, at least not to the same extent.  Indeed, the Catholic Church here, whose priests and nuns provide religious instruction in schools, in a country where First Communion and Confirmation are taken much more seriously than in many places (certainly than back home in Britain) openly and happily denounce Hallowe'en as being Evil, and encourage parents to ignore it and punish kids who join in the fun.  Mind you, they say likewise about the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas.  Which says a lot about the the shape of things here right now.....

No, the big day here is the next day, November 1st.  All Soul's Day.  The old religious festival - that has pagan roots rather than Christian - is the third most important day on the calendar, after Christmas Eve and Good Friday.

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Traditionally, people are expected, and indeed are taught from childhood, to remember and pay their respects to their deceased relatives.  This is done by visits to the graves of parents and grandparents, aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters and cousins who have passed away.  Parents take their children, and often travel the length and breadth of Poland to carry out these devotions.  All Soul's Day itself is a religious holiday with shops and businesses closed (their workers are obviously making their own observances).

Visitors do not only take flowers, as is the norm in the UK.  Far more predominant are the candles, of varying sizes and in a dazzling array of coloured and clear plastic vases.  Most graves end up with two or three bouquets and at least half a dozen candles.  By the end of the day, even the smallest and darkest cemetery is ablaze with the light from hundreds of candles. But Polish cemeteries, at least the city ones, tend to be huge affairs with thousands of graves spread across many acres, so you're talking tens of thousands of candles.  The light from them can be seen from some distance - I can remember flying in one All Soul's evening under a bright cloudless sky and being able to clearly see the patches of golden light that marked the cemeteries in many towns and cities  that we passed.  It's a beautiful and moving sight.

In fact, the whole event is that.  I don't consider myself in any away devout - I have my own set of beliefs that are a kind of Christianity, that I have come to over a lifetime and that comfort me - and do not belong to any recognised religion.  I was christened Church of England, though my teens attended a non-conformist Baptist chapel and ended up marrying two Catholic girls and attending Mass most Sundays (once the kids came along) but was never confirmed in either of the first two and never converted.  I'm not an atheist, but it would be difficult to classify me as Christian either.

Yet there is something comforting in standing at the various graves of my wife's departed, lighting our candle and placing it carefully amongst the others (we are never the first to arrive), then stepping back for some moments of quiet prayer and contemplation.  When the kids were small, my wife would lead them in some traditional Polish prayers and the kids would join in the genuflection and "Amen" conclusion.  I would listen in silence, as I still do, lost in my own thoughts.

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Every time I go back home to visit my sisters and sons and their families, I make a pilgrimage to my home town in Kent.  I've watched it change over the years: the High Street changes, more housing, more people, a one way system and traffic lights. But remaining constant are the graveyards in Church Street, the old one-time council estate where I was born.  In one of them my parents share a grave, with a grey marble headstone and edging, gravel base and flower pots.  Compared to some of the huge headstones that dominate Polish graves, its small beer indeed, but of course it means the world to me.

I clean it up, dispose of any old and dead flowers and weeds, give it a sweep, change the pot water and place my own bunch of chrysanthemums - my parents both loved the flower.  All the time I'm chatting to them, telling them what I'm up to, how the boys are (my dad died before any of them were born but mum was there for all three) and their families and children; I've introduced my two younger children, born and raised both Polish and English, when I took them to visit when they were smaller.  I get some funny looks from people who might pass (few and far between), but that's ok.  I don't pray, at least in the traditional and recognised way, but have a chat and thank my God for looking after them - it's the kind of informal prayer I learned in my Baptist teens and I'm comfortable with it. 

I went back recently, the first time in nearly three years, now COVID has abated somewhat - at least enough to allow travel (with some restrictions.  The town has changed little, and nor had the graveyard. But mum and dad's plot was badly in need of some care and attention, the headstone and surround and pebbles around the flower pots filthy dirty and covered in grime from three years or more of completely understandable neglect. I went to the nearest tap to get a can of water to at least try and spruce it up a bit, but there were no watering cans. A notice requested that mourners bring their own: an old lady passing by told me all the public ones had been stolen.  It made me very sad.

In the next, older part of the churchyard, are the graves of mum's mum, my aunt Rose and my cousin Taff, so I usually stop by and say hello to them as well.  It's all very low key, you could say typically British, but if gives me comfort.  Not in the least like a Polish All Souls Day devotion, which is a real family affair that fills the graveyard with visitors for probably the whole weekend.  I can't remember ever seeing more than a couple of people at any given time when I've been to see mum and dad.

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 My parents would both be over a hundred now were they still alive, both born when the First World War was at its height.  My dad, Wilf, was born in a very small village close to the Kent - Sussex border that has hardly changed since then - I went back a few years ago and it looked exactly as I remembered it in my childhood, when my elder sister lived there, and my late teens when my paternal grandmother died and was buried in the little churchyard there.  After leaving school at a probably young age (as was typical in poor - what would then be considered lower though I prefer the term "working class" - families) he went to work at the local castle as an under gardener.  The grounds were quite extensive and included a small lake in which he planted some water lilies that still proliferate today, even though the place is now owned by the National Trust.

There he met my mum, Floss, who had been born in a small town 6 miles or so away - my home town in fact.  She was working at the castle too - "In Service", was the job title.  Basically she was one of a staff of young boys ans girls who spent long hours cleaning, washing, ironing, peeling vegetables, waiting table, clearing up the mess - I knew it was hard work, but reading sections of Bill Bryson's excellent book "At Home" I have a much clearer picture of what that actually meant.  What you see in Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs or any one of a dozen Merchant Ivory productions is a very sanitised and romanticsed alternate reality. It was really brutally hard work for next to no reward or what we recognise today as workers' rights.

Wilf and Floss met, somewhere, somehow, fell in love and married shortly before World War 2 broke out.  They lived in a small cottage in the castle grounds but had to leave that when dad signed up and marched off to war.  Mum was moved into a brand new council house and lived there for the rest of her life.  I was born there, the only son, with two elder sisters.  It was a struggle at first bringing up the girls on her own, but with the community spirit that existed then, all neighbours mucking in together, she got through it.

Dad, meanwhile, had a year in North Africa under Montgomery, part of the heroic Desert Rats that defeated Rommel's Afrika Corp and brought the area back into Allied control.  Job done? Not a bit of it: after a brief leave off he went again, this time to Burma, where he remained until 1946.  Yes, yes, I know the war ended a year earlier, but it seems there was still work to be done.....  He was wounded twice, neither seriously, met Vera Lynn, the Forces' Sweetheart when he was in hospital recovering from one of them (she spent a half hour chatting to him apparently.....he never forgot that, and it was a cherished memory until he died).  But he survived, and came home to a wife who was a stranger and two daughters who had no memory of him, and with no job and little money.  Like thousands of other young men - he was just 31.

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I can't imagine how they got through it all, rebuilt their relationship, stayed together in our little council house, made me, and brought up the three kids....  I don't think dad was ever paid more than about £25 a week, and he had a succession of jobs: a stoker at the local gas works, a coalman, a removal man, and finally for a number of years a mill operator in a plastics factory.  All dirty, hard jobs in polluting environments. Whether they led directly to the cancer that killed him at the age of just 56 (I was 19 at the time) is open to debate, and nothing can ever be proved now, but I suspect it did.

But he was a lovely man.  He was quiet and placid - possibly a result of some kind of PTSD after Burma? Who knows! - and never had a bad word to say about anyone.  I can't remember him ever raising his voice or getting really angry about anything.  He had an allotment that, with our big back garden, provided the best fresh fruit and veg I've ever eaten.  He smoked (which probably didn't help) and enjoyed the odd night out at the local men's club or British Legion with mum and their friends, veterans all.  A couple of brown ales and that was enough.  He saved my life twice when I very small, both near drownings, but made no fuss either time, and insisted on cleaning my football boots after every game, right up until the last couple of weeks of his life.  He was my hero.

Mum was my rock.  She was always there when I came in from school and refused to get any kind of job until I left school (then took one in a tobacconists and worked there until retiring a year or so before she in turn died of another cancer). She was more volatile and had a temper on her, far more so than dad, and ruled our home with a strong but kindly hand.  Neither her nor dad ever smacked me, as far as I can recall - not more than a tap on the arse anyway - but I was under no illusions about what was acceptable behaviour.  Discipline was gentle but effective.  She was a terrific cook (aren't all our mothers?), and I remember the most wonderful Victoria Sponge cakes, jam roly-polies and fruit cakes for Sunday tea or when we had visitors. I always had clean clothes freshly ironed (difficult I recognise now, as I was a messy kid and always came in from play with cowpat on my trousers, or split seams in my school uniform that needed mending overnight (without a sewing machine)......but she always managed somehow.  She was my heroine.

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I never mourned either of them properly, when they passed.  I was just a kid, fresh out of school, when dad died and in my first job.  Mum and my sisters were distraught so I took on the burden of arranging the funeral, sorting out his final payout from the factory, all that stuff, with the help of Brian Oman, the minister at the Baptist Church.  I didn't have a lot of time to mourn, and then as the main breadwinner had to stay strong for mum and and my sisters.  To help, I hit the drink for several years....... But I got through it.

Then when mum died, I had my own family to think about and stay strong for, for my kids were in their early teens and had been very close to mum.  Again, I had to make the funeral arrangements, then with the help of my brother-in-law sort out the house.  Mum had bought it as part of Thatcher's Right to Buy initiative, but my sister and he decided to move out so there was much packing to be done.  It took some time, and my own precarious work situation to handle (working for a highly aggressive US investment bank that insisted on long and unrelenting hours and didn't take prisoners) was also critical.  So I didn't really mourn her either.

But I missed them both, and still do, all these years later. Hence the annual pilgrimage to the grave that I missed the last couple of years.  The emotional dam finally broke, many years later.  I was ironing, the radio was on, and a particular song came on. There's a verse in there where the singer believes he heard his late father's voice in the cry of a new born son.....  That did it for me: the tears came, long and painfully, but at the end of it I felt much better.  I still can't listen to Mike & The Mechanic's "Livin' Years" without a tear in my eye though.

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They were good people, my mum and dad. 

Farewell, Facebook

 

So the whistle-blower has now testified before Congress and the British Parliament and held firm to her story, despite Facebook's attempts to discredit both her and her testimony.  This should be no surprise to anyone who has followed the story, or indeed the growth and decline of the platform.  Sure, it has billions of users, but the service it now provides and the way it works has changed very much for the worse.

I've had enough.  I'm off.

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Mark Zuckerberg created the platform and founded the company when he was a spotty teenage undergrad at Uni - he never did complete his degree.  It was all very altruistic: a way to maintain contact with friends and relatives, have a bit of fun, organise dorm parties, exchange bright ideas and unused stuff no longer wanted, and have a good old on-line natter.  It worked, so well that it quickly outgrew its home Uni base and spread to other college faculties and then national and international - by which time the Boy Wonder had dumped his co-creators (paying them off, only to be sued for millions more later as the market value of the company soared) and moved out to the West Coast where all the tech action was and remains.  He had also expended his vision and dreamed of world domination - he wanted everyone in the world to sign up and be on the platform all day every day.  He spouted off about how the users could find groups of like minded individuals, and Change The World.  He did that alright, once people like al Queda and ISIS and the Leave Britain campaign figured it out.  Which is not to say Leave Britain was a terrorist organisation - it was no more than a very tech savvy political campaign group that utilised the power of the internet much better than the Remain campaigners did, dragging Britain out of the EU and thus changing the EU and the world in the process.  Zuckerberg must have been very happy that the user data allegedly bought or stolen (depending on who you believe) by Cambridge Analytica and passed on to Dominic Cummings and his mates Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage yielded such spectacular results and proved his prediction correct. FACEBOOK REALLY COULD CHANGE THE WORLD.

It also made him shedloads of money.  As the market value soared, so did his net worth, and the monstrous growth of ad-driven revenue - the real open secret of Facebook's success - dwarfed anything generated by other social media companies (indeed, any other company except maybe Amazon and Apple).

This is when the thing came off the rails, at least in my humble opinion.

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It hadn't taken long before the conversations and interactions I was having with my Friends and Family began to be swamped by garbage.  But it took a while before the pictures of cuddly cats and dogs, old cars and motor bikes, useless surveys planted by advertising companies masquerading as users aimed simply at harvesting yet more data, and memes that were often meaningless or obscene and only rarely funny, began drowning out the good stuff I wanted to see.  

Then the Groups started invading my space.  I joined a couple of work related ones, in the hope that I could find more customers for my fledgling consultancy, but in two, maybe three years I got precisely no interest.  Zero.  Nothing. Not a nibble. And I got really bored of other Group members either complaining that contractor rates were depressed, the system wasn't the same as it used to be (I should bloody hope not!) and whatever happened to Old Joe Soap, what a character...... I left the groups and shortly thereafter the industry itself.  I retired.

The hate speech, already evident, also started proliferating.  This was about 5 -6 years ago, when the so-called Migrant Crisis was causing panic and dismay across Europe, and the Orange Oaf lied his way into the White House using the internet in a way not dissimilar to Leave Britain except with more abuse and racist bullshit to please his redneck support base.  The effects of both events are still being felt today, even if the geography has moved East and the Orange Oaf shown the door (and still fighting tooth and nail to convince everyone he was hard done by).

I had made the mistake of responding to some of this crap - initially arguing with a Brexiteer Friend (who is no longer on the list), and then adding my fourpennorth to the political arguments raging around migrants and Trump.  I neither regret nor retract one word of anything I wrote then, but my received abuse went through the roof.  It was no longer the friendly banter between close(ish) Friends on opposite sides of a discussion, no matter how big the topic under debate was, and morphed into the most vile abuse from total strangers, people I had never met, were never likely to meet and frankly had no desire to do so. 

Since then, my Feed (or whatever it's called these days) is awash with stuff.  My use of the platform has correspondingly shrunk, because I'm no longer interested in it.  On a normal day, I get perhaps 50 new posts hitting my page.  Of that, the majority - maybe 35 or 40 - are memes that in most cases remain unfunny and uninteresting. Often I get the same one from two or maybe three different sources.  Of the remaining posts, half a dozen are appeals to help find a runaway or someone who has conned a sweet shop out of a few quid or something similar, or an appeal to "share this beautiful photo to keep Princess Diana's memory alive" or something equally mawkish.  Perhaps two or three are actually from a Friend or Family member with something interesting to say.  Instead of spending an hour or more a day looking at Facebook, I now dip in and out, maybe 5 or 10 minutes (maximum) each time, perhaps three times.  

And it's still too much.

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Since the whistle-blower has clearly stated that Facebook's algorithms are designed to specifically highlight and disseminate content that could be controversial or unpleasant, and provided documentary evidence to support the claim (the company of course denies it), there is no doubt in my mind that this is not the cool, altruistic link-all-mankind dream project that Zuckerberg originally launched.  I knew that was the case anyway, because I've seen the changes already - as I've written here.

She clearly states that the algorithm does this specifically to enrage people who read this stuff, encourage them to make their own contributions, and maybe click an ad or two, join a Group or so - and thus increase Facebook's revenues and hence Zuckerberg's fortune.  Since he has veto over every decision made by the management team this is clearly something he knows about and supports.  

She also suggested that spreading this kind of content could very well negatively impact a user's mental health, that Facebook knew this but cares more about profits than their users' well being.  This is particularly so with Facebook's acquisition Instagram, apparently.  It's not an app I either use or understand - like Twitter, I just don't get it - but I'm familiar with it because someone close to me uses it and has had personal issues with its content.

As I'm a bit mentally fragile myself these days - another story altogether - I'm finding it increasingly upsetting too, and getting more riled up, more angry, about some of the stuff than ever before.  To give a simple example: the other day something popped onto my Feed concerning the current crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus.  It shared a link to a BBC News website story that was essentially accurate, about the German people's reaction to the relatively few refugees that have managed to get across the border and cross Poland in their attempts to enter Germany - a reaction depressingly brutal.  But what really upset me was the reaction of the Facebook users commenting.  It was angry, supportive of the extreme right neo-Nazi group the story was about, and praising the governments of both Poland and Belarus for their actions.  Even Merkel was slated for her part in this (she has none).  I only read maybe 10 out of 200+ comments, and not one showed even the slightest knowledge of what is happening on that border: every one was racist hate speech, pure and simple.  I made a post (I couldn't help it!) trying to point out some of the facts, expecting to be slated for it.  To my surprise, no-one bit. In one sense I'm happy about that, but at the same time the border tragedy is still unfolding and forgotten already by Facebook.  It's yesterday's news - except for the poor penniless sods stuck in a cold wet forest with no-one to turn to.

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Anyway, that's it for me.  I am closing my Facebook account. Oh, I know it's not the only culprit in this whole social media circus that I have no doubt whatsoever will continue to cause untold harm to millions until or unless somebody finds a way to reel in the companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and whatever, and makes them tone down the hate and police their platforms properly.  And that opens up an entire and even more difficult argument about free speech and censorship and government interference and service vs profit......and I'm not sure that one will ever be solved.  We've come too far down the slippery slope to get back onto the higher ground, it seems to me.

I'm sure I won't miss it.

Back to Blighty - How was it in this post-Covid world?

 

Finally!  

After several months of stop - start planning, largely down to the prohibitive costs and restrictions BoJo's amateur Government chose to apply to travellers to and from the UK, I managed to get back to my homeland after almost exactly 2 years.  Getting to see my grandkids, especially the lad born last year during Lockdown, and visiting my ailing elderly sisters has been a target since early this year, when restrictions began lifting, but it's taken much grief, stress and expense to finally achieve it.

And how was it?

In a word....interesting.

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I'm fully inoculated, as is my wife and my daughter who accompanied me to England.  We have our EU Covid passport documents.  Last month, I visited Switzerland for a couple of weeks, solo, and it was a painless travel experience, no different from a pre-Pandemic Schengen hop.  The only extra document I needed to complete was the online Swiss locator form.  It took two minutes to do, and within 5 minutes I received an email from the Swiss authorities that included a QR code as admission approval.  No-one asked to see it at the Check In and Baggage drop at Warsaw airport.  At Zurich we parked as usual at a Schengen gate, I walked up the jet-bridge into the terminal, collected my bags and strolled out into the Arrivals Hall, where I met my host and off we went.  In fact at no time during the entire two weeks was I asked to show the QR code and only twice the EU Covid passport (when I went into restaurants).

Contrast to a proposed visit to England, and the service provided by the relevant agencies in Switzerland.  The Swiss, pragmatically, adopted the EU Covid passport immediately, and waived the need for a pre-travel test in either direction.  There were no concerns about the efficacy of the Polish vaccination program.  No additional information was needed.  But England?  No.

When I first started planning a trip to bring my kids over, back in May, Poland was Amber listed (as it remained until the traffic light system was finally dumped this month) despite rates of infection and death being significantly lower in Poland than in the UK. This meant we would have to quarantine for 10 days out of the 14 in the trip.  We would have to have PCR tests before departure (so in Poland) and provide written proof we were clear. We would then have to take further tests on Days 2, 5 and 8 while in quarantine, using private Government approved clinics.  There are over 450 of them listed on the Government's website, with test prices ranging from £50 to over £200 each.  Our EU Covid passports were not accepted in the UK: we were told by the Home Office (after half an hour on the phone listening to the worst muzack I have heard anywhere) the only ones acceptable were those issued by the NHS.  I pointed out I couldn't provide those as our inoculations had been carried out in Warsaw - what did the Home Office suggest?  The answer:  "I have no idea.  Try the NHS Help Line.  Or look on the website."   I had already spent two hours doing that, without success, and decided life was simply too short to repeat the exercise.  With a hire car sitting unused on my sister's drive for 10 days, all of these requirements were going to add a good £2000 to the cost of the trip.  I decided to wait until things changed. 

In September, effective October, they did.  A bit.  The EU Covid certificate became acceptable.  The traffic lights disappeared and Poland became an acceptable travel destination again.  I didn't need a pre-departure test nor to provide additional proof, but I would still need a Day 2 test.  I booked the flights, for a brief long weekend - leave Poland Thursday morning, fly home Monday afternoon.  This meant my Day 2 test would be Saturday, and I would be leaving on Day 4, probably before the results were known, but ok.  I filled in my Locator form.  It was not possible to include my wife and daughter on my form, so had to do three.  I had to save the document after every input (Forename - Robert - Save.  Surname - Cooper. Save.  And so on.  And on.  And on.....).  Then you're asked for a Locator reference.  What????  That turns out to be the Order Number issued by the clinic you buy your Day 2 test from.

Back to square one.  I trawled through the endless list of clinics that, according to the Government website, served London and the South East.  They were located in, amongst other Home Counties hotbeds, Manchester, Bolton, Glasgow, Hull and Belfast.  So much for the "Filter by location" option and its South East choice.  In the end I chose one that didn't want to add a Day 8 for good measure, didn't want me to collect the kit in person, provided a return courier envelope and allowed me to select a delivery date and hotel destination.  Nearly sixty quid each plus thirty quid for DHL  Two hundred smackers all in.

That didn't go well.  We arrived at the hotel in Dartford, the Campanile that I have used a dozen or more times over the years, on time but the parcel with our tests didn't.  Nor did it arrive on Day 1 (Friday) when we made our pilgrimage to Edenbridge to the grave and on to my sister and Tunbridge Wells.  Saturday was Day 2, test day and check out day.  Still no package.  I went to the supplier website and called the Help Line.  The number connected me to a different (but similarly named) company who of course knew nothing of my order and could not help.  I asked the hotel for a number of the local DHL depot to call them, and had a row with some twonk who came in a minute or so after me and decided to lecture me on what the hotel staff should and should not be doing - helping customers apparently not on his list.  The hotel couldn't (or wouldn't...) help.  Back to the internet on my phone and excessive roaming costs to try a parcel track on the DHL website.  None of the references quoted on the supplier email were accepted.  Cue a call to my bank in Warsaw to request a reclaim and, inevitably, cancel a possibly compromised credit card.  I'm now locked in a battle to get my money back, difficult when all parties are denying responsibility......

We travelled home without having taken the mandated Day 2 test, so presumably I broke the law. No-one asked to see any paperwork in any case - and the episode goes to show, in my humble opinion, what a mess the Government's travel regulations remain. 

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We packed.  I made up a folder of screen prints for all the Locator Forms (they ran to about 6 pages each) plus hotel and car hire papers.  Off to the airport.  No-one asked to look at the Locators again, and our EU Covid passports were accepted.  We were waved through passport and security.  We boarded.  A 737 MAX, the one that was grounded for two years on safety grounds.  But it was fine: seats very comfortable, very quiet, entertainment streamed to your device rather than on individual seat-back screens. The food was crap, but we're talking LOT here, RyanAir's Polish clone, flag carrier though it is.  We dozed most of the way (early morning flight meaning stupid o'clock alarm calls

At Heathrow, passport control was fine except my daughter's e-passport didn't work (apparently she's too young) but the desk agent rather impressively spoke fluent Polish and they had a nice chat. The car was decent, a Citroen C5 with about 3000 miles on the clock, but because of the fuel shortage only half a tank of unleaded.  We had to take a photo of the fuel gauge, tank wherever we could find a garage selling the stuff, and return the car similarly half empty.  We managed it fine, and had no problems at all finding well-stocked garages.  I wasn't too surprised, since the haulage and petrol industries had spent a week saying there was no fuel shortage, the refinery tanks were full, the issue was in getting the stuff to the retailer garages because of a driver shortage.

Let's consider that.  The Government itself admits to a shortage of 100,000 drivers, which matches what the Road Haulage Association, Shell, BP and other haulage companies were saying.  Everyone, except the Government gave a list of reasons for this shortage, with the industry unanimously stating Brexit as a major contributing factor as many drivers had been forced to go home to Europe as the Government did not consider their trade important enough to grant them visas. Sure, many drivers also left the industry because they retired, or got fed up being away from home for days on end stuck in traffic jams.  Of course Covid played its part with lay-off's and furloughed drivers not coming back.  But hang on a minute: ALL of those were foreseeable (except for Covid, of course) - why has everyone waited until now to start hiring and training (or re-training) replacements?  Such scenarios were, I recall, being mentioned during the pre-Referendum arguments as a reason to Remain, and being branded by Boris and his acolytes as lies, part of Project Fear (which actually never existed - but that's another story entirely).  In any case, the Referendum was over 5 years ago, Brexit itself almost a year - why has no-one done anything in the interim?  As usual, the Boris Johnson It'll Be Alright On The Night rhetoric has seduced an ill-advised and unthinking public and a bevvy of sycophantic rent-a-quote MPs to Do Nothing.  Again.  That's not to say I entirely blame the Government - I don't.  I would have expected the road haulage companies themselves, whether steady Eddie Stobart, Shell's fleet, Asda, whoever, to have been more proactive and taken action themselves to fill their vacancies (as far as possible) with suitably qualified drivers.

Someone has seriously dropped the ball, in my humble opinion, and it's Joe Public who is suffering.  Again.

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Our hotel choices offered another contrast between then and now.  The Campanile, as I wrote earlier, is familiar after years of use.  It's a typical cheap and cheerful transport hotel close to the Dartford Crossing, and thus used primarily as an overnight stay for people - mostly commercial - breaking their journeys on a long haul to the Channel ports.  But the rooms are comfortable if basic, the bar is fine and the restaurant food very good and reasonably priced (especially the Full English breakfast I normally take).  That was before the pandemic.

This time the bar and restaurant were closed, with breakfast limited to a paper bag contained a yoghurt, a cereal bar and a stale croissant.  We found this out when we went down to eat on Friday morning.  There was nothing on the website when I booked and we were not told on check in.  The fabric of the place is desperately in need of some TLC as well.  The room we had was shabby, with a massive crack in the sink.  The hair dryer didn't work. There was no cleaning service - the room was in the same condition (unmade bed, wet towels in the bath) when we got back Friday evening as when we left in the morning.  The staff we had contact with were friendly enough, but unfortunately not very helpful.  I will not stay there again.

In Kings Lynn we booked a room at a Travelodge.  It's a name I'm familiar with but had never used before, and I have to say it was excellent.  From the outside, it looked very similar to the Campanile but perhaps newer, and stood next door to both a very good pub and a Starbucks, so the expected restaurant closure (clearly signposted on the website at booking) was no hardship.  The girl on Reception was Polish, from Olsztyn in the Mazurian lake district, very friendly and very efficient.  The room was spotless, very clean and comfortable, and cleaned and re-stocked with coffee, sugar and milk while we were out on Sunday.  Travelodge caters to a similar market, and is never going to be a Holiday Inn or a Sofitel ot whatever, but doesn't try to be.  It offers a clean comfortable place to spend a night on journey, and in my view hits the spot.  It cost perhaps £10 a night more than the Campanile, so for me represented terrific value: the two hotels were chalk and cheese. 

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The trip itself was fine.  I had no problems at all getting petrol and returned the Citroen with the required half a tank.  We visited many supermarkets because we wanted to stock up on English goods that are simply unavailable in Poland: stuff like proper Walls sausages and bacon, Custard Cream biscuits, Fray Bentos meat pies, Ginsters pasties, and a refreshing tea tree & mint shower gel no longer sold here but that I love.  I will admit to feeling uncomfortable in the supermarkets because of the almost total absence of face masks.  Covid is still with us and will be probably forever, like measles and the common cold or flu, but remains much more virulent.  What seems to be missing from all the Government's "advice" that masking is now optional is the clear warning that there is  no such thing as a 100% effective vaccine, booster or no booster, so that everyone, double jabbed or not, could still catch Covid and pass it on.  Masking probably helps reduce the risk of this, and for that reason alone should be encouraged for the foreseeable future.  Just my opinion......and we kept our masks on, despite the funny looks we were getting all the time.

We ate well on proper English cod and chips with salt and vinegar liberally applied, or a thick gammon steak with fried egg, chips and peas (both in the pub next to our hotel in Kings Lynn) and a superb carvery meal (I took pork with crackling and all the trimmings) at a nearby restaurant where we took my sister for her birthday.  The Abbots and Timothy Thompson ales went down a treat as well, as did my wife's Stella Artois.  As the sun shone on Sunday we went for a stroll around Hunstanton in all its seedy out of season faded glory, the archetypal English seaside resort that remains rooted in its Edwardian heyday.

We visited my old home town to deliver flowers to my mum and dad's grave, a ritual I perform every visit.  After three years' understandable neglect it's covered in stains and dirt, but I couldn't do anything about it because all the watering cans have apparently been stolen: a notice asks visitors to kindly bring their own.  And if that isn't an indictment on how far values have fallen in 21st century Brexit Britain, I don't know what is.  Very sad.

The country itself hasn't changed much.  The countryside remains the green and pleasant land of my childhood, but there are more motorways with more roadworks, and much more traffic (despite the fuel shortage), most of it driving too fast and erratically, especially the big proportion made up of Polish registered freight trucks, I'm afraid to say.  But we managed and my damaged arm held up well - it was the first time I had driven on the correct side of the road and had to use it to change gear since the operation to repair the ruptured bicep, so that was good.  

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In summary, England seems to be coping reasonably well with all the bad stuff of the past couple of years.  The Brexit favouring majority must be satisfied behind their Union Jack patterned dark glasses, but I can't help but feel the worst effects so far have been masked by the recession caused by the pandemic and the money pumped into the economy to support it.  But that can't happen forever, and I suspect the HGV shortage and resulting fuel and food shortages is the first problem to come to light.  More will follow.

The Government, if I can call it that, appears to me more disorganised and chaotic by the day.  Johnson has lost all  sense of reality - that's if he ever had one - sunning himself in Spain (presumably tired after the Tory Party Conference) over the weekend while incompetent Ministers struggled to cope with a gas supply shortage affecting the steel, glass, paper and ceramics industries badly.  There are certainly issues to resolve when the Chancellor directly contradicts the Minister for Trade and Industry, effectively calling him a liar.  A strong Prime Minister would have sacked one or both immediately, but Johnson is not a strong Prime Minister, despite all the bluster and optimistic bullshit so both remain in the Cabinet and the problem rumbles on.  And this should be no surprise, because both are Johnson loyalists to a fault, praising him and Brexit at every opportunity.  He is surrounded by them.

It will probably be three or four months before I go back, as much as I would like it to be sooner, but first I have to pay off the credit cards bills from this trip.  I wonder how things will be then.......